Little Caesars Arena will be everything Joe Louis Arena is not, for better and for worse. It will be first class, state of the art, at the heart of what the Ilitch family plans to be a thriving residential and commercial area known as "The District Detroit." But it will not be the simple arena where we witnessed so much history.
The Red Wings are building a new arena because of many of the things that make Joe Louis Arena the Joe. It is a Spartan gray box of siding and cinderblock down by the Detroit River, surrounded by cracked concrete. It has three windows, and they're portholes cut into metal doors on the ground floor. It has smelly stairwells and crowded concourses. The out-of-town scoreboards have been broken for years, covered by banner ads, and the main scoreboard screens are small and in standard definition.
But the Joe has character and gives the Red Wings an old-school home-ice advantage. It is one of the last unique rinks left when so many new ones are essentially the same. It's named for a boxer, not a bank. There are suites, but all on the top level, keeping high society up high. The seats are red vinyl, worn from years of use, but the fans don't come for comfort and often stay on the edges. The sightlines are good. For big games, the volume is full blast.
"It's not a big show around it," Red Wings captain Henrik Zetterberg once said. "You come in and watch hockey."
The end boards are the last in the NHL still made of actual wood. Beneath an eighth of an inch of white plastic, there is three quarters of an inch of plywood and another half-inch of plywood painted red, supported by a steel frame. It makes the end boards the bounciest in the League. When Nicklas Lidstrom played defense in Detroit, if he couldn't find a shooting lane, he often would miss the net on purpose, knowing the puck would ricochet into a scoring area.